


Dead and Dead Again

by SuchenNach



Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, OC, Self-Insert
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-07
Updated: 2016-11-24
Packaged: 2018-02-12 03:38:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 9,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2094279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SuchenNach/pseuds/SuchenNach
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Death sucked. Life was a pain in the ass. Ninja here were the exact opposite of stealthy and I was just stuck hoping that my existence meant something here and god wasn't just laughing his ass off. SI (kinda) insert.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter one

Dying was a curious experience.

One moment I was there, living an ordinary life, having had an infallible belief that everything was okay and at the end of the day I was just going to go home.

~ _Badump~Badump~BadumpBadumpBadump~_

There was a flash of pain, of hysteria.

 _What’s happening_?

 A stuttering of my heart

 ~ _Badump~Baaadump~Baaa…dump_ ~

_RedRed blood, Oh god it hurt so much!_

 And then…nothing.

It was so quick that it was over before it really even began. I didn’t have any thoughts of my family, no flashbacks of regrets or happy moments just a passing thought of,

 _Well, that really sucked_.

There was no white light. There were no relatives waiting to greet me with open arms. In fact, there was absolutely nothing, no gravity or ground, no light either just an all-consuming nothingness. It could have lasted a minute or a second or it could have been infinity. Time held no meaning in this place there was only now no future or past just the present of here and now.

That shattered as violently as I had died.

My mother in my new life said I came into life like I was cursing at the world.

She would never know how true that statement was.

I don’t remember the whole shebang of birth or my mind blocked the experience from me which I am supremely grateful for. Birth is not something I would like to remember.

No, the first thing that I remember is a bright light that was so different from the blackness that had previously engulfed me. There were blurry sights and sounds and smells that were suddenly surrounding me.

It was too much at once for the baby’s body that I now had. The control that I had had previously disappeared like so much dust in the wind. My instinct took over and I wailed as long and as hard as I could.

_I died! I’m dead!_

_Ohgodohgodohgod!_

_What is this, where am I?_

_Who are these people?_

There were hands and faces that blurred together and it was **too much**.

_And Oh God why can I feel again, I don’t want to feel again!_

And then it all stopped and I was placed on a table or a bed with blankets and all too suddenly abandoned.

Still I wailed and wailed until my breath caught and I couldn’t breathe and the little baby body that was now my mind and soul’s container blacked out from exhaustion.

 

 

The next time I awoke I had a calmer perspective of things. I was still where the nurse had placed me before and if I really concentrated I could hear the noise of scurrying people a ways away. I was rested and ready to find out what the hell had happened.

I did have a few ideas. Something must have gone wrong when I died. I did die, that was a fact I knew it with all the certainty that I had. I didn’t want to think about how I had died it didn’t matter now even though I was still in shock. My decision to never think about my death was probably just because of shock but it sounded like a great idea and I wasn’t about to go against that decision.

No, something had gone wrong because I could still remember my old life. I don’t know if after death there was life again, essentially reincarnation. I didn’t know if I was an anomaly and whatever deity was up there had looked away for a split second and my soul had slipped by and entered a babies.

 I didn’t know, I may never know.

The question I asked myself now was not how I got here it _was so what do I do now?_

_And just where exactly was I?_

I could possibly be in another country which would suck because then I would have to learn language all over again or I could be in a different time period or an infinite number of other things could have happened.

A baby’s eyesight is really limited and sucked ass, badly. Nurses looked like paint splatters and it hurt to focus my eyes on them for any period of time. Smell and hearing were duller than I remember having but even so after not hearing anything in the void for so long ever smell and sound hit me like a jackhammer.

No wonder baby’s cried so much. It was flat out painful just lying here and not being able to cover my ears or plug my nose.

The only thing that helped was sleeping, you can’t hurt if you’re asleep. Luckily or I guess as lucky as I could be in this situation, babies sleep a lot.

 

 

I’m pretty sure I was in that hospital for a couple days. I slept most of the time only waking when a nurse fed me with a bottle or I was changed, which is an experience that is so humiliating that I just got in the practice of totally blanking out for that period of time.

Nurses came and went and in between times of sleeping I wondered where my ‘mother’ was. I don’t know a lot, or anything really, about having a kid but one would think that I would at least see the women who birthed me once.

But she remained elusive until one day a nurse in a bright pink frock came in and bundled me up and took me away.

 

My first look at my new mother was not enough to draw any conclusions about her appearance (bright blobs of color were not enough to judge what a person looked like). I could however draw the conclusion that this was the most kind-hearted warm, loving individual that I had ever met.

When she tucked me to her chest there was no high pitched baby talk that I had fully expected to be on the receiving end of. There was just the warmth of her body and a smell that reminded me of safety and home.

She did talk to me but it was like she was just talking to another adult. The language was not English but her voice was soft and low and full of love and I drifted off to sleep feeling better than I ever had since arriving in this confusing world.

 


	2. Chapter 2

I don't remember much of my first month in my new home. I slept a lot and also grieved a lot.

I was silent and sullen and didn't particularly want to be there, even if my mother was warm and loving. It felt like a betrayal of the highest kind to even like this women when I had already had a mother that I loved in the before.

However, the real baby side of me kept insisting that this was my mother now and when I tried to shun her, my baby instincts forcefully took over and made me coo and gurgle at her. Most of my first months there were influenced heavily by the baby side of me.

As time went on though the two halves that I had split into, the baby side and the adult me, were integrated together. I didn't forget anything of my old life but there was little grief if I didn't focus too much on it. I continued to gain control of my urges and except for the rare instances I never cried without needing something and was, in my estimation, a fairly pleasant child to be around.

I believe it was about a month and a half before I met my father for the first time. I had wondered about where he was before but was not overly concerned about him not being there. Just like my mother I was not overly excited about a new father.

I had been lying passively on a blanket in the middle of the living room floor with my mother in the kitchen bored out of my mind when I heard the door slam and a male voice yell out what seemed like a greeting. I had a long way to go until I understood anything really in this new and difficult language.

My mother came rushing out of the kitchen into the living room and almost as if an afterthought she picked me up to take with her.

What the hell was she so excited about?

I was juggled around a bit as she rushed to the front door. There was a male sounding gasp and I tried to coordinate my movements enough to turn my head enough to catch a glimpse of this intruder.

When I finally caught sight of him he was already reaching out for me. My mother gently handed me over and I held my body stiffly when I felt his large and callused hands on my soft skin. He handled me very carefully almost reverently but he was new and strange smelling and I wasn't quite sure if I should cry or just ignore it.

As it turned out I did neither.

He lifted me up with his hands underneath my armpits and held me up to his face. The first thing I noticed was that he had orange (orange!) hair. Not ginger hair or red hair or even a nice shade of auburn. No, it was the brightest most unnatural shade of orange that I had ever seen. It was the first hint that I was in a world much, much different than the one I had left.

The second thing that I noticed, after of course I was done baffling over how a man had orange hair, was that he already looked like he loved me. Like I was the most precious thing in the world to him, and just how was that even possible I had just met him and then,

Oh!….Oh, this man was my father.

Mother gave him a hug and a kiss and went back to making dinner while he spent the rest of the day and part of the night just holding me.

And that was the day that I gained a father.

It was about six months later give or take that my eyesight improved enough to make out finer details; it was also around that time that I realized that my father wore a metal headband.

The headband of Konoha.

A fictional manga that I had read part of before.

A story book, I had been reborn into a fucking story book.

One does not have a realization like that and not freak out. My thought process after that for about twenty minutes was an insane amount of cussing that could've made a sailor blush if they had heard it.

To my utmost embarrassment I am pretty sure I even passed out, which was a bit awkward because my father had been holding me at the time. When I came to a few minutes later it was to my father jumping around and flailing like a little kid have a panic attack, I had been placed a safe distance away from him of course. It was actually pretty funny and let me focus on something else then being in fucking Konoha.

He was finally stopped when my mother came into the room and saw me perfectly fine and my father a gibbering mess. She took matters into her own hands and gave him what looked like a painful punch to his head and pointed to me said,

"What…doing? She…fine."

Well that's not what she said exactly but it was what I understood, and yay I was understanding the language a little and wasn't that an awesome feeling.

It wasn't until they had settled me in for the night that I really thought about the predicament that I was now in. I didn't even want to think about how it should be impossible for me to have been reborn into a fictional world. But I had, had my freak out earlier in the day and that was all the freaking out that I was going to allow myself to do. It was not in my nature to be hysterical over something that was not going to change and I would not lie to myself and deny it, so I made a mental list.

Shinobi were real.

My father was a shinobi, and I was pretty sure my mother was too.

I didn't know where I was in the timeline but I was in Konoha because my father had a leaf headband.

I could seriously affect the plot just by existing.

I was probably going to be heavily involved because my parents were shinobi and they would expect me to be one too.

Did I want to be a ninja?

…..Yes.

Yes, I wanted to be a shinobi. My last life was good, I was content with what I had but I had been so damn bored. I had no passion for anything and glided through life in a fog of passivity and boredom.

Being a ninja would be hard, it would contain regret and grief and long hours of practice and long periods of time away from home.

It would also be living, really living.

And I was excited. A light tingling feeling appeared in my lower stomach, I was really excited.

The next day I decided that there was no time like the present and started to try to find my chakra.

It took a lot of effort to focus myself for long periods of time because of my newly acquired baby attention span but also because my mother, also I now know called Kaa-chan, was always checking in on me. Tou-san (father) was not home as he had left early that morning, for a ninja he was sure loud at home.

It took an embarrassingly long time to get into a meditative state but when I did I met a curious thing that felt like a wall and like the absolute moron I was I thought it a good idea to give it a nice big push.

No one ever accused me of having too much caution, or any caution really.

It was like a tsunami full of information. With an almost audible 'pop' I felt chakra. It was not a nice and slow flow of feeling, it was like a barrier that had been holding the chakra back had fallen and I could literally Feel everything.

I could feel Kaa-chan fumbling around in her room, I could feel the houseplants scattered around the small house, I could even feel myself and Oh dear God I didn't feel like everyone else.

There was something else in there, mixed in with normal chakra and that couldn't be right, that shouldn't be there

Get it out…GET IT OUT!

'Plip…Plip'

I looked down at my hand and tried to concentrate around the sudden pain of feeling life. The sudden wetness on my small, chubby hands was blood. I lifted my trembling hand up to my face and wiped my nose, a bright smear of red was left on my hand.

This wasn't right, it shouldn't hurt like this.

Notrightnotrightnotright.

I started to scream….

In the chaos that followed I kind of blanked out from the pain.

Kaa-chan had in a flurry of activity bundled me up , tucked me under her chin and ran out the door and proceeded to jump from roof to roof all the way to the hospital.

I didn't fully come to until the doctor had pronounced me fine and had given me a sedative.

I would later find out that he had told a frantic and distressed Kaa-chan that,

'No, everything was fine with me, I was not hurt I was just a chakra sensor and she should treat me as if I were teething.'

Bastard

It was, in fact, a little like teething in the sense that after Kaa-chan had taken me home and I finally woke up in my crib that the informational onslaught had lowered to a mere constant annoyance.

Of course at the time my sensor abilities made it so that I had a constant low key headache and made me incredible grumpy.

It was not my proudest moment when a frightened Tou-san showed up the next day and in a batch of relieved kisses to my face I bit him on the nose.

Yeah, not my highest moment there.

It took about a week before I was able to summon enough courage to actually steel myself and mold my chakra.

Or you know actually try to mold chakra cause let's not get ahead of ourselves here.

It was night time and about an hour since an exhausted Kaa-chan and Tou-san had gone to bed. I settled myself into a comfortable position and meditated.

I had not forgotten that besides me finding out the pain of being a sensor that before I had blacked out I had noticed that my chakra was not right. Kaa-chan's chakra felt light and warm like the sun and the plants chakra felt earthy and green which was confusing in its own right. Chakra had a feel to it; it wasn't just a mass of blue energy it was kind of like a fingerprint.

When Tou-san had come home after hospital incidence I had felt him too, he had felt like a lazy river of flowing chakra or a calm, deep, massive lake. He had by far the largest chakra signature I had felt so far, which was admittedly not a lot but it was bigger than Kaa-chan's by a significant amount.

Mine had not felt like that.

Sure, part of it had felt like it was supposed to, and really I wasn't an expert so how could I really know for sure what chakra felt like, but mine had felt like, well like water almost. Flowing like water and in no real hurry to go anywhere the other part, and it was mixed in with the watery part, felt almost like it was dark.

It was hard to understand and even harder to explain but it felt like the night.

Like I could wrap myself in it and hide from the world and it felt like safety and like an integral part of me.

And apparently like the idiot I am I tried to do just that.

It was like I was in a trance, well I was meditating, but like I had no control over my actions. The dark was beckoning to me, it wanted to be used.

And wasn't that just odd because wasn't that me, how could it want something?

I reached for it and whatever it was met me half way and it felt happy, and it was happy and I was happy and then, oh shit something was happening.

I was still halfway in meditation and halfway towards panic when I opened my eyes and looked around me.

The window above my crib looked normal with a quarter moon high in the sky and a full brigade of stars out. The inside of my room, however, looked a bit darker than it should.

Huh, I wonder why? I thought to myself.

And then I looked down. I would forever be grateful that since I was still halfway towards meditating that I did not in fact scream, I just froze.

Shadows writhed around my small seven month old body. They were most concentrated around my body but as they got farther and farther away they fanned out until they made the room just seem a little darker than it should be instead of the living shadow that surrounded me.

I took a couple deep breaths in through my mouth and blew out through my nose trying to get my mind once more under my control. Slowly bit by bit I relaxed my leg muscles and then my stomach muscles and finally my arms.

Clenching my fingers into fists and then releasing a couple more times finally calmed me down enough to think about this rationally.

I look at the shadows around me and actually studied them this time.

They seemed to be intentionally sticking close to me. Hugging my body and after another second of studying I realized that they were actually hiding me from view.

When I focused enough it was like I had double vision. In one sight I was surrounded by shadows that moved and twirled and shifted and in another sight I couldn't see my body, I could see the room but as I shifted my sight from the room back to my body it was like I had become shadow.

After another minute or so of observation I tentatively reached out and tried to catch a shadow. I don't know what I expected to happen, well actually I expected the rules of the universe to kick back in and I would realize this was a dream. But when I reached out the shadows responded with all the enthusiasm a none living thing can respond with.

They actually felt a little like puppies, as weird as that sounds, like really, really enthusiastic puppies that had just been dying for me to finally notice them.

It was just the thing to calm me down all the way. I mean how could something that felt like a part of me, hurt me?

They couldn't, the shadows were me and also not me because I wasn't controlling them right now but I knew, knew that they could never and would never hurt me.

After that earthshattering revelation of holy crap I can control shadows, I lost pretty much all reservations about them and just played with them and enjoyed myself for the rest of the night.

Chakra control and the ramifications of this weird shadow ability could wait another day, right then I was a giggling child that had just learned that I was pretty much a super hero with kickass powers.


	3. Chapter 3

My eyes snapped open with mild panic. My heart stuttering a couple beats before steadying into a calm thumping rhythm.

Where am I?

My eyes glanced over the room

….Something's missing…..

I squinted my eyes at the sudden sharp light that fell across my vision.

Sunlight?

The clanking of pots and pans and a person humming tunelessly under their breath could be heard distantly.

That's right, I fell asleep.

I shifted myself into a more upright position with the help of the crib bars. My blankets tangled around my feet.

I had played with my shadows almost the entire night before finally settling down a couple of hours before sunrise. I blinked sleepily and yawned before wondering where my shadows had gone.

A little more awake now and listening intently to make sure that Kaa-chan was still in the kitchen before I mentally 'tapped' on my chakra. Instantly there was a reaction as shadows seemed to snap out of my skin and slither over me.

I jerked in shock and almost fell over, I had not expected them to react that quickly. A jolt of adrenaline had spiked my heartbeat so that it was pounding an incessant beat against my chest again. It would take quite a while to get used to that. I took a couple of breaths to steady my heart once again and studied my shadows in the light of day.

Something was different about them.

There were…fewer shadows now then there were last night. Concentrated around my body was the same mass of black writhing shadows but unlike last night they stayed compacted around me not fanning out over the entire room. Examining the shadows again I realized that they also seemed less dense then they had last night.

That..actually makes sense. The light should affect them in some way, just like ordinary shadows.

But what I really wanted to understand was why? Why did I have control over shadows, to my knowledge both of my parents had no such technique or bloodline. It seemed entirely exclusive to me.

I wiggled my toes absently in thought. A deep contemplative frown appearing on my face.

I had two theories of what could have happened. First, was that I had mysteriously happened to just have a Doujutsu, a mutation that had happened sometime while my body was still in the womb.

Or, and this wasn't in any way a saner idea than me having a bloodline, was that being reincarnated had affected me more than I had originally thought.

It was a scary thought. That death had clung to me and had affected me even into my new life. What could happen to me if this particular theory proved true, would it try to pull my soul back into death?

The shadows were a part of me though; if they hurt me they would essentially be hurting themselves also. It just wouldn't make sense.

I sighed, frustrated and ran a pudgy hand over my face, tugging absently on my short but thick, tawny orange hair. I just didn't know. There were so many things in this new world that just didn't make sense and I could either pull my hair and be frustrated or I could just accept them and try to adapt as best I could.

So what? I had control over shadows, okay then, I would deal with it. I would experiment, find my limitations and eventually move on.

I knew I had to hide it though. Nothing good ever came from other people thinking you were special. They would use me, experiment on me, and eventually I would probably die an early death.

Konoha may seem like a nice place to live but even in the few times Kaa-chan had taken me on a walk through the village I could see it was a militaristic place. The hokage would use me for the good of the village and he wouldn't feel bad about it either.

No, it would just be better all around for nobody to ever know I had this 'gift'. Maybe when I was older and actually had power of my own I would just say it was a new technique I made. If it ever got really bad and I was ever on the verge of being discovered by lets say Danzo then I would also consider going rogue. I labelled it a contingency plan, stuffed it into the back of my head and moved on.

Coming back to my surroundings I realized that my shadows had stayed on me throughout my whole dilemma and I 'tapped' on my shadows again and they sank reluctantly back into me.

It was kind of a weird feeling, like there was a tiny thread connecting me to them, I knew where they were and they seemed to even have a limited range of emotions. There was 'happiness' that I was using them and 'contentedness' that they were with me.

And that was a whole new bucket of strange, how in the world could shadows feel? Really, the strangest things seemed to happen to me.

I huffed a sigh and ran a pudgy hand through my wild mess of hair. Scrunching my nose as a bright orange bang fell into my face.

Man, I loved my hair. It was messy and ranged in colors from a tawny gold to a bright tarnished orange. It looked like the embodiment of a lion's mane. It was bad hair for a ninja to have or at least those ninja that were required to do stealth missions but if my memories were anything to go by than this world was chock full of ninja's who were more often to go the route of frontline fighter than sneaking in the shadows to kill someone in their sleep. Which sounded very interesting to me, if most of the ninja's now were so obvious than who would expect an orange haired, wild eyed brat to be good at sneaking?

With my shadows I could be one of the best; of course I would also focus on taijutsu and specialty weapons also sounded very interesting to me.

This life may be the most dangerous life I could ever be reborn into but damn if it wasn't exciting.


	4. Chapter 4

As with all things life went on. Surprisingly fast for how boring day to day life was but I guess that even with my routine rarely interrupted with something new and interesting I was still a child and childhood tends to fly by especially when you’re up most of the night training or well at this point it was mostly stumbling around with an abstract concept.

Anyway when I was, in my estimation, about a year old my mother finally started to take me outside for extended periods of time. Which meant going to the park.

Now while I was bordering on ecstatic just being outside and actually seeing Konoha’s daily life going on, I was not so happy about being put in a sandpit with other babies and left there while my mother socialized. In fact, I can honestly say I was absolutely disdainful of the other children. 

Kaa-chan had just plopped me right in the middle of a group of children around my age in a sandy area just outside of the older children’s playground. Trying to turn my head to watch her retreat without falling over I saw that she had made a beeline towards the other mothers. To be honest they looked like a gaggle of geese all gossiping in a circle. 

Seeing that no help was going to come from my mother who had not looked over once since abandoning me I decided to take stock of my surroundings. I noticed immediately that there weren’t any clan children or at least there were no clan markings on any of the one year olds. Which made sense to me, clans would probably keep their children within their compounds not wanting to risk any ordinary children influencing them in such a young and impressionable age. 

I also noticed that all of the kids were just an small blip on my chakra sensing radar. The trees bordering the edge of the playground had more chakra than these brats. The grownups had noticeably more chakra, and I realized I could actually feel out which ones had the developed chakra system of a ninja without looking over to check for headbands. Which was so cool. When I didn’t have a headache from all the information bombarding me, this chakra sensing thing was pretty cool. I concentrated a little more and estimated that my current chakra sensing area was pretty small, with it petering out at about twenty feet.   
Growing bored with mostly just sensing trees and civilians I turned my attention back to the babies surrounding me. 

And then I noticed the drool. I may sound like an unfeeling bitch but I had never liked children and especially not babies. I watched in horror as the kids around me grabbed at everything in reach with sticky hands and drool covered chins. Most of them had absolutely zero coordination and kept swaying from side to side. There was one boy in particular that I watched with detached horror as his head bobbed on his shoulders so much that he plunked right onto the sand face first. 

I watched as he seemed to take stock of what had just happened, seemingly stunned and then a great inhale of air and a whoosh as he let it out in a great earsplitting scream. You would think that he had just broken his face with the wailing this boy was letting out. Good Lord did he have some lung capacity. 

And the screaming just wouldn’t stop, even as his mother seemed to realize which baby was crying and rushed over to calm him. I watched with increasing horror as each baby realized they were being left out of such a great time to measure and compete with the other kids wailing and one by one they each inhaled and let out a wail that made my ears want to bleed. 

I am so done here.

Since I had been practicing with my coordination with a lot of single mindedness I had an easier time rolling over onto my stomach and crawling away. My goal was the grassy area about ten feet away, which while a great distance with my baby body was far enough away that the crying would lessen a decibel or two. 

Of course with a ninja mother I didn’t get that far, about five feet from victory a laughing Kaa-chan swooped in from behind me and lifted me to face level.

Her laughing blue eyes and smiling mouth were almost an insult if not for the way that she also seemed mildly impressed with me.

“Where do you think you’re going Chinatsu-chan?”

I frowned grumpily at her, my nose scrunching up and my eyes narrowing.

In response she just giggled.

“Well I suppose if I had to deal with such an annoying sound than I would crawl away too!”

I huffed at that and she rolled her eyes.

“You’re growing up too fast, if you’re so unimpressed with other kids your age now then just imagine how exasperated you’ll be when its been a couple years and you’re in the academy!”

With that said she swung me up over her shoulders and started to amble her way home.   
She started to talk again but now her voice was quieter and held a note of wistfulness or maybe even sadness.

“I know you understand me, or well maybe not all of what I say but enough.”

I tensed when she said that and mentally cursed myself for not trying to hide my intelligence harder. She must have noticed that I was unimpressed with most of the baby toys she and Tou-san had bought me. I was so stupid! I just hoped she hadn’t caught on to the fact that I practiced meditation and shadow control late at night. If she had then all my half realized plans had gone to shit. I had been complacent, when I couldn’t afford to be in a ninja village. God, she was my mother though, I hadn’t even really thought of the possibility that she would rat me out to the hokage!

“Now don’t be like that!” She said sharply when she felt my legs tense in her hands. “ I’m your Kaa-chan and I love you and would never do anything to hurt you!” 

“I’m just worried for you. I want you to have a childhood, a better one than I had. I want you to make friends and play and explore new and exciting things. But I know it’s hard when you look at the other kids and find that they aren’t looking back.”

She paused there for a little while as she slowly walked past the crowded open air market. It was mid-day and in the full swing of things. I had relaxed enough from Kaa-chan resting my fears that I was able to enjoy the excitement of the market. Vendors called out loudly, advertising their goods. Brightly colored stalls and customers rushing to get the best and freshest fruits and meats. The sounds all blending together, a boy calling out to his mother, a young girl scrambling between legs and laughing as another boy chased her. A customer haggling over prices with a vendor, both looking irritated at the other and refusing to budge. 

The chakra seemed intent on matching the franticness of their people. All different kinds of chakra bombarded me from all sides and most of it tasted of smoke, it was Konoha of course, which meant most of these civilians even without developed chakra systems were predisposed to fire. Along with the taste of smoke there was also excitement and irritation and worry all clogging my nose and throat with the cloying not!scents of them. I couldn’t tell what all of them were feeling just the really loud broadcasters.   
I just didn’t want to know.  
shut up!

Most people were quieter with their emotions and after a while I kinda just shut all of it out. It was supremely distracting and annoying most of the time to sense people. 

A particularly interesting scent caught my attention and I glanced over at what seemed to be a booth selling spices, the man looking like a stereotypical fat wealthy merchant. A sly smile on his face and a shrewd glint to his calculating eye. 

He tried to get Kaa-chans attention but she turned her head just so and her forehead protector glinted and he hurriedly backed off. We continued on in silence for a few more minutes before we reached the end of the market and only then did Kaa-chan continue her talk from earlier. 

“I..” She seemed to struggle on how to phrase what she was thinking. “I will never force you to do anything you don’t want to do. I will always give you a choice if you want one, and if you don’t want to be a ninja then I will protect you from any backlash that might happen.

“ Of course I might be a little disappointed because I want you to follow in mine and Tou-san’s footsteps but your choices above all are what matter most.”

I wanted to interrupt her there and tell her that of course I wanted to be a ninja, I wanted nothing more than to make her proud of me and that she was silly for worrying but no matter how smart I was or how fast I had progressed so far I still couldn’t get my tongue and mouth to form words.

“ And although I want you to have friends I won’t force you to. I know these things can only happen naturally and I won’t interfere. But I know that you’re smarter then the kids at the park are and I know it’s difficult to pretend to be someone who you’re not, and I guess what I wanted to say was that I love you and I will always support you and I won’t ever, ever let any shinobi take you away and use you for this stupid village!”

She rushed through the last sentence and let out her breath with a big whoosh. 

I was so incredibly touched. This women who I was lucky enough to have as a mother in this life loved her daughter so much that she would go against her own village to protect her. Do you know how rare that is? Someone who was brainwashed since they were in diapers that the village always comes first would risk everything for her child. 

If I hadn’t been set on being a ninja before then I was certainly dead set on being one now. I would do everything in my power to live up to the incredible legacy that this women was. 

I struggled with my lips and tongue contorting and twisting my face until I finally choked out,

“Gaa-chan……lauf joo.”

While absolutely awful pronunciation the beaming smile and loud laugh that she gave me was worth every indignant second of it.


	5. Chapter 5

A couple of months after Kaa-chan and I had our heart to heart when I was about one year old or maybe a couple months older that’s when everything went to shit.

It was dark and I was playing with my shadows again. Holding up a chubby hand I watched as my shadows flowed through my fingers like water. I was starting to get a lot better at controlling them, now I could get them to partly merge with me covering my body in a thin film, so that I blended better into the dark without looking like a dark shadow mass as I had the first time I had done this exercise. I was just about to recall them and get some sleep, happy with my progress when a massive chakra signature slammed down onto my senses. 

One moment everything was quiet and then BAM a chakra tsunami slammed into me. 

Oh God what was that!?

I actually fell from where I was standing, the air knocked out of me as I wheezed for breath. For a moment I couldn’t tell what was up or down and the room spun in dizzying circles around me. And then disgusting malevolent chakra twisted sinuously around my body, choking the air around me. I had never, ever felt chakra so physical like it was in the air around me and every breath I took it felt like I breathed it in and it twisted in my lungs and coated the back of my mouth like sour bile.

 

This fucking chakra tasted like anger and 

hothothot oh god it’s going to burn me from the inside out!

It tasted like blood and death

And I knew, I knew what death tasted like because I had tasted my own before and 

Blood was welling up in my mouth and I swallowed but the thick iron taste of it made me gag and it was overflowing and I was choking on it and I couldn’t breathe oh God I couldn’t breathe!

A rumble like an earthquake tore through the house and slammed my head against the wall ripping me out of my panic attack. I took a few, quick deep breaths and tried to focus on what the hell was happening. That chakra I had never felt it before but that didn’t mean I didn’t know who it belonged to. 

FuckFuckFuck, how stupid did I have to be to forget about the Kyuubi!

I had been so happy, so deliriously happy with my family that I never stopped to think about what happened to the Kyuubi, if it was already sealed or not. 

I gasped as another wave of malicious chakra pushed down on me like a physical thing. I choked a little as I tried to get my breath back. My parents should have already come in to check on me. And then I started to hear the screams. 

My eyes wide and my breaths coming in short hard pants I maneuvered my way out of my bed and dropped to the hard floor. A stinging sensation on my knee let me know that the skin had split but I ignored it as I tried to stand under another wave of massive chakra.

Just barely successful I stumbled and made my way to my door which was just slightly cracked open. I had just managed to open the door when another rumble shook the house and I fell again to my hands and knees as dust and small wooden splinters fell from the ceiling. 

This body was so freaking useless, this frustratingly small body with legs shivering so hard I could barely stand was so disgustingly helpless anything could kill me right now. 

If I make it through this I will never be weak again. I’ll train my fucking ass off until even a Bijuu will hesitate at the sight of me!

I started to crawl my way to the back door, even though it was dangerous out there it was completely possible that this house would fall and crush me, that was not going to happen.  
A irritatingly long time later I reached the back door and pulled myself onto my feet with the help of the wall and grabbed the metal doorknob.  
And promptly let go after a searing pain shot through my hand. Crying out and cradling my hand I fell onto my butt, trying to keep my tears at bay because that wouldn’t help me at all in this situation, I braced myself and opened up my hurt palm to take a look at the damage.   
Nope  
Just no I am so not going there right now. My palm look like the top layer of skin had just been flayed off. Deciding to not even look at it was the only decision I could make right now, there wasn’t anything I could do. 

I was essentially trapped in this house, this house that was burning down around me apparently. Pulling my burnt hand up to my body I used the wall to help me off my butt and slid along it until I hit the bathroom. I couldn’t climb out a window and the front door was too far away and most likely too hot to touch anyway. I wasn’t going to delude myself, I probably wasn’t going to survive this. So I just climbed into the bathtub and turned the shower nozzle on full blast, unwilling to give up the small shred of hope that someone would save me.


	6. Chapter 6

The months after the attack are like a faded dream. Everything just spinning and spinning round and round until it all spun together like wisps of smoke. It felt like I could have just waved a hand through it and everything would just fall apart. 

Waking up alive after the attack soaked to the bone in the bath was nice surprise. Finding out that it had been a day since the attack and no one had come for me was a, to say the least, less than nice surprise. 

My first immediate thought was that either both my parents were dead or that they thought I was dead. That last thought didn’t really make any sense though, if they thought I was dead wouldn’t they still come back for my body? 

It was more likely that they were dead and no one else knew where I was. 

When I tried to move myself from my hunched position I found that my bones felt fused together. So much time in one position with ice cold water raining down on me had made me feel like an ice carving. Working on bending my toes first, then rolling my ankles, and flexing my calves and thighs I finally felt I was ready to move from the bathtub and find my way out of this half burned down house. 

Walking was surprisingly easy, without the Kyuubi knocking me off my feet every few seconds was most probably the cause of my success. 

Traveling across the length of my house was like the march of the dead. As I walked further and further I became covered head to toe in charred ash, ironically I was almost the same color as when my shadows covered me. 

Almost as in response to my thoughts on them, they stirred and waved a feeling like worry under my skin. Apparently they could emote now. Yeah, not going to think about that, I just took comfort in them as they wrapped themselves around me, under my skin. 

I was slow but steady in my walk down the hall, almost to the front door. I really didn’t want to open it. Opening that door was to admit that my parents were most likely dead. Most likely I would be gathered with all of the other orphans and their legacy would eventually be forgotten. In the end it would be like they didn’t even exist at all. 

But I had faced my own death before. Those people that had become my parents in the short time I knew them would be a blow but not as big as losing my last family had been. 

In the end what would it matter that they had died, I had moved on before and I would continue to do so. The march of the dead was one I had marched before, this would be no harder.

I put my uninjured palm on the door knob, absently noting that I was now completely covered in ash, and opened the door.

After my eyes recovered from the initial glare I noted that the weather was bright and sunny without a cloud in the sky. It was a jarring contrast from the screams and wailing coming from the civilians around me. 

As I looked up I could spot shinobi jumping from roof to roof headed to dig out civilians and scope out the disaster area. What looked like chunin and genin teams were on the ground helping with dirty and confused small children and wailing adults. 

Dazed and apathetic I wandered from my front door to the beginning of the street and sat down. There was no where pressing I had to be, and it looked like none of the other people noticed me yet. 

My shadows tightened their grip and tried to comfort me as much as they were able to but still the outside world hazed and time flowed by. 

Time seemed immaterial flowing by in a haze only marked by civilians and shinobi passing me and the sun slowly warming my chilled skin.Lost in my own head I barely acknowledged when a dark shape blocked my view, when it didn’t move after a minute I focused my strained eyes and looked up. 

The grim and dirty face of my father greeted me. I was not particularly happy or sad, really I felt nothing at all for him in that moment. I had a faint wave of guilt float through me at that thought but it was quickly squashed at the look on his face. He didn’t look very happy to see me either. As he continued to just stare right through me I observed him.

He expression looked like his whole world had ended, he was covered head to toe in ash and blood and burn marks. He didn’t have to say a single word, I knew that my mother was dead. 

I didn’t feel much of anything at that realization either. I wondered, as we continued to stare at each other, if I would feel much of anything ever again. I felt faintly amused at that thought and felt my shadows stir under my skin. I wondered vaguely if my shadows had been concentrated underneath the skin around my eyes if others would notice them. They eyes were the windows to the soul after all and right now I felt as dark and wisp-like as a shadow could ever hope to be. 

——————————————————————————————————————————

The funeral for my mother wasn’t much of a funeral at all.  
“Too many dead.” the officials said, “ to give every ninja a proper burial.”   
They burned her on a pier with the other dead as my father and I watched. Afterwards they carved each name into the memorial stone. 

Father had shown up and stood by me but as soon as it was over he was gone. He always seemed to be gone now. 

I clenched the hand that had been burned a silvery sheen covering my entire palm and fingers. I would never feel anything there again. The fire had burned away my nerve endings and the medics had had to worry about much more severe wounds than mine. They gave me a wrap and burn cream and didn’t think about me again.   
It hurts sometimes when I touch something too cool, aches inside of my hand like someone was trying to grind my bones.   
I flex my fist sometimes just to feel the hurt. Sometimes I wonder if that is all I will ever feel, just pain and nothing. 

Years pass and I still feel empty, my father is almost never home. I have had to raise myself in his absence.I smile faintly and it is not a nice smile but it is amused. Could you really abandon a child that wasn’t a child? It doesn’t matter in the end, I take care of myself and when it is time I enroll myself in the academy.

Standing in front of the doors and watching parents reassure nervous children I smile faintly again, it is the same not nice smile from before. This time though there is the faint hint of shadows swirling around me and sharp teeth flashing. I feel more and more like I brought something with me after being pushed out of death. It feels big and monstrous and tastes like hellfire and brimstone, and it anchors itself in me a little bit at a time. But I couldn't seem to decide if it truly was something alien or if brimstone was just the taste of my anger. 

I see more and more children show up, clan children are glaringly obvious but so are the civilian children. All of them are nervous and excited and scared. I could see it in their faces and also feel it in their chakras, I smiled a little wider flashing more teeth that looked oddly sharpened in my small mouth, and I feel a little more amused as their nervousness increases. 

They don’t notice me yet but few do when I don’t want to be seen. It seems my only talent is hiding and I am only talented because of my shadows but since my father has practically disappeared from my life I have increasingly trained in the use of said shadows. It was the only head start i’d have it seemed, what with no father to teach me. 

I crooked my head and my interest peaked when I saw children start to arrive that I recognized. I saw Sakura with her petal pink hair and her shyness, standing apart and digging the tip of her small sandaled toe into the ground. I wondered absently if Ino would be there to knock that out of her or if she would drop out from her own failings. 

Absently I twisted a strand of my lions mane of hair around my finger, my hair being the only thing that really stood out about me. It wasn’t as big of an inconvenience of pink hair but only because when I willed it my shadows would twist through my locks and create a slithering mass of black. I had been assured by the one civilian that I had accidentally shown it too that it was terrifying, the way they had pissed their pants had been both disgusting and oddly satisfying.

I turned my mind from such things and twist the shadows back into myself, they caress my bones and see through my eyes. Sometimes I don’t know if I have a physical body or if I am made out of ribbons of dark and painted over to give me color.  
I let go of the thought and turn towards where the prospective shinobi have gathered, their parents have trickled away and all that is left are innocent faces turned towards the Hokage. I even spot a hint of yellow hair and blue eyes before it is covered up by the crowd.


End file.
